Tag Archives: SUN

There was a time when James Gosling was living a life of pride. His company Sun Microsystems was on a good head start and Java was moving closer to being a decisive platform in the world of programming. In the midst of all this, Sun forgot to manage their income source and invest in some finance improvement. Result: Sun came plummeting down and Oracle took the opportunity in buying it.

James Gosling, the lead Java developer gave an exclusive interview to eWeek outlining these details;

Just about anything, I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. There is actually a long list of things that played into my leaving Oracle; here were things like my salary offer. After getting my offer from them, I tried to figure out what my compensation would be like on my W-2 form and it was a major hit. They copied my base salary!

The reason as given by James Gosling is,

Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. Therefore, I and my peers in the Java area were not allowed to decide anything. All of our authority to decide anything evaporated.

Oracle has full power and authority over the intellectual property of Java and this upsets James Gosling.

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems quite some time back, which developed Java, the most popular programming platform. Oracle has accused Google of violating seven patents related to Java’s intellectual property.

The Android OS and the Dalvik VM is based on Java, but Java is still used in many mobile phones and is a major competitor of the Android platform.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt used to lead the Java team at Sun Microsystems before he joined Google. Google hasn’t commented on the issue yet.

In a move of desperation, the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) has threatened to dissolve itself if Oracle does not appoint a person to take decisions regarding OpenSolaris by the 16th of August.

There has been no official update to OpenSolaris for thirteen months. The last update was OpenSolaris 2009.06 when Sun Microsystems was not under Oracle. After Oracle took over Sun Microsystems, not much has happened to OpenSolaris. There was supposed to be a new update in February as OpenSolaris2010.02. Then it was pushed back to March as OpenSolaris2010.03. However that too did not happen. After taking over Sun Microsystems, it seems Oracle has dropped everything related to OpenSolaris. In almost a year, Oracle has not made any kind of communications to the developers or end-users regarding OpenSolaris.

On top of all these, it has been reported that Jeb Dabsteel, Oracle senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer did not turn up for the OpenSolaris Governing Board meeting after confirming that he will attend it. Obviously the OpenSolaris Board is disturbed by all these and have issued the following statement:

The OGB is keen to promote the uptake and open development of OpenSolaris and to work on behalf of the community with Oracle, as such the OGB needs Oracle to appoint a liaison by August 16, 2010, who has the the authority to talk about the future of OpenSolaris and its interaction with the OpenSolaris community otherwise the OGB will take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle.

Oracle has not given any official response to the OpenSolaris Board’s threat. But it will be interesting to see what they do next. Will Oracle crumble under the pressure or will they simply not care?

We all know that after acquiring Sun Microsystems, Oracle became the largest open source company around. Red Hat finds this hard to believe and goes to the length of saying that Oracle is not even an open source company.

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat has claimed that neither Oracle and nor Sun were as involved in open source as Red Hat has been. He goes on to say,

Open is not just seeing the code. Open is also having a community of developers. OpenSolaris is not open. There is no community other than Sun people developing Solaris.

Clearly in the wake of competition, Red Hat is trying to change the very face of open source. Though, whatever Paul said in that statement is correct commercially even though it might not match with the ideology of open source.

Every open-source product is incomplete without a dedicated global community. Additionally, finance is not the only thing that is needed to keep open source software alive.

Clearly, implementing open source as a business is not as easy as it may sound. All eyes are set on the management plan Oracle brings in for Java. This will define a lot of changes as Java is currently the most used platform.
(Via: NetworkWorld )

James Gosling, who was the CTO of Oracle’s Client Software Group has resigned from his post. The reasons for this resignation are not yet announced, but Gosling is reported to have said,

As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.

Gosling has held the office of CTO for both Sun Microsystems and Oracle. He led a small team of developers into creating Java, the programming language which has been recorded as the top programming language in the Tiobe index for several years in a row.

This resignation follows the likes of Tim Bray and Jonathan Schwartz. Just last month, Gosling made some positive remarks on what Oracle is doing with Java. Though, he also raised concerns on the Java Community Process.

This resignation does not come as a surprise to many as they were expecting it sooner. After the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is doing Sun more harm than good. The deal was loss making for both Sun and Oracle but the future after the deal could have been a lot better. Though, the statement made by Gosling is highly controversial. We will see more light on this incident and know the exact details once James Gosling comes clean about it.

This week has seen a lot of activity in FOSS. In this post, I will present a weekly roundup of some key events that will determine the shape of things to come.

News

Oracle focuses on Java

Oracle has now become the world’s largest Open Source Company in terms of market share and enterprise solution expertise. Whatever Oracle does determines a lot of other sectors and fields. Oracle announced that Java will be focused upon by the company owing to its potential and current giant share in the development sector. Also, the JDK version 7 will sport many nifty features and easy integration with newer technologies. Read more at itWorldCanada.

BBC is planning on introducing DRM for its broadcast content

If this plan gets through, Open Source users of UK will not be able to watch the BBC television programs. What a shame it is to see that this feature is not present in the receivers, and this move is not made by BBC itself. BBC is being pressurized by copyright holders to do this and they threaten to withdraw the rights to air their shows. What is even more insane is that they wish to implement this throughout all devices. These devices include the Television, the Recorders, Burners, basically everything that can store the program. Follow up at OMG! UBUNTU.

Tips and Features

Ubiquity slideshow in Ubuntu installation

Ubuntu Linux has just released its first public beta. This beta gives a peek into the latest features and visual enhancements which will appear in the next version of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. One of them is the Ubiquity slideshow during the installation.

No matter how much we hate to admit this, Oracle might just be the largest open Source Company in the world. It is true. Oracle has some of the biggest brands in the Open-Source world under its name now.

This happened with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The Open Source projects hosted under the banner of Sun have all come under direct handling of Oracle and include some of the most popular technologies of today like Java, MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Glassfish, Virtualbox etc.

Some of the Open Source technologies, currently being developed under Oracle are,

MySQL: The Open Source database powering almost every website out there.

OpenOffice.org: The best alternative to paid Office suites, available for free and full file format compatibility.

VirtualBox: The free virtualization solution from (earlier)Sun Microsystems, now managed by Oracle.

OpenSolaris: The Unix based OS with the best features of Solaris and compatibility with the Sparc architecture.

Java: The enterprise development solution, a robust and developer friendly software development platform.

Eclipse: Oracle plays as a board member and strategic developer with Eclipse, a development tool.

Oracle VM: A server virtualization platform.

This list is far too small than this one, but it gives a gist of what Oracle is doing, and it looks good. It is time we start liking Oracle for what it is, and stop complaining about what it will never be.

Oracle has plans of merging the two JVMs available for Java, namely the Sun HotSpot and the JRockit. The news of the merge surfaced through a webcast this week. It is said that the merge will take roughly eighteen months to two years. On this development, Mark Reinhold, Oracle’s principal engineer has said that the company would continue to develop both platforms in the short term.

Although the decision is believed to have been taken some time ago, the news of such a possibility was floating from last month when Oracle mentioned this at a conference. HotSpot was Sun’s own implementation of JVM while JRockit was acquired by Oracle along with BEA systems.

On this merge, Reinhold said:

It’s not an easy problem taking the best of each, figuring out what the long-term convergence plan is. We’re not going to just stop doing one of them. Customers have things in production on both, taking advantage of specific features in both. We’re not going to cause an earthquake and make systems fall over. At some point in time, I expect there will be one VM,

While the HotSpot has a better runtime compiler, the JRockit has a better garbage collection. The merger will create a powerful virtualization with the best features of both.

A lot is already happening at the Sun-Oracle merger end. There are things Oracle is doing which can help it gain favor in some communities whereas, at other places it sure is ready to make some people frown.

Rumors were that Oracle would make huge layoffs after its acquisition of Sun but Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has clearly denied these reports. Ellison Said on Wednesday,

It took a while, but Oracle and Sun are now one company. We’re very excited. Sun has a wonderful heritage of engineering and innovation.

Not only this, Ellison also gave us an insight of the future plans of Oracle by saying,

Our vision for the year 2010 is the same as IBM’s vision for the year 1960, which is go ahead and deliver a comprehensive suite of technologies.

Against reports of Sun firing around 3000 people sometime in October, Ellison actually laid plans for more hiring shutting down all layoff claims put on Oracle. On this hiring, Ellison said,

The truth is, we’re actually hiring 2,000 people over the next few months to beef up the Sun businesses, and that’s about twice as many people as we’ll be laying off.

Clearly, with this move, Oracle is looking at a future like IBM did in the 1960s. Oracle is equally interested in hardware and software now that it has an array of options to choose from. Also, it is in Oracles best interest to keep many of Sun’s technologies like Java, MySQL and OpenOffice.org alive as their popularity is unmatched all over the world.

The European Union has finally approved the Oracle-Sun merger. The deal which was seen as a tough anti-trust issue got clearance after a long period of hold. The deal was examined critically and was extremely controversial. On one hand where MySQL fans were worried about its future at the hands of Oracle, Oracle was constantly assuring them with promises of support for the next five years. The deal which was initially viewed at $7 billion was proving to be a loss for both Sun and Oracle.

On success of the deal, Neelie Kroes, the European antitrust commissioner said,

I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products,

The Sun Oracle deal was held for review by EU and many other antitrust safeguarding agencies and was a long antitrust case. Oracle executives and CEO Larry Ellison will hold a meeting next Wednesday, with Sun executives on how to join the products of both the companies and release them under one single banner of Oracle.

The reason EU gave for approving the deal was,

although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment.

Following this deal’s approval at EU, those dependent on the EU to protect MySQL are heading for other countries like Russia and China, where there is still a chance.

The approval comes as a big blow to campaigns to protect MySQL but now that EU has approved the deal, others will simply follow suite.